Dear diary...

You can hardly move for political diaries - Edwina Currie, Matthew Parris, Tony Benn; everyone's publishing them. Even Alastair Campbell is writing one. But what do they tell us? And are they to be trusted? Biographer Ben Pimlott reads between the lines

Dear diary...

You can hardly move for political diaries - Edwina Currie, Matthew Parris, Tony Benn; everyone's publishing them. Even Alastair Campbell is writing one. But what do they tell us? And are they to be trusted? Biographer Ben Pimlott reads between the lines

Thursday 17 October 2002 21.37 EDT
First published on Thursday 17 October 2002 21.37 EDT

Political diaries are everywhere. Hard on the heels of Edwina's, there is news that Alastair Campbell keeps his own record of events. Not since the days of Richard Crossman has keeping a private journal been so cool. But what does it all add up to?

Once upon a time, diaries were locked in vaults until everybody mentioned in them was safely dead. Those days are past, and now nobody is safe. Politicians complain that a kind of verbal CCTV captures their every remark or action. A single ill-judged handgrip or politically incorrect pat - long forgotten by the gripper or patter - is liable to crop up in serialised form a few years later, for the titillation of the many, and anguish of the few.

It was Hugh Dalton, Labour's famously indiscreet postwar chancellor, who started the fad. His goal was fun, not money. When the first volume of his diaries was published in 1952, Herbert Morrison happened to be dining with Jim Callaghan and his wife, and found a copy in the loo. "I didn't know the bugger kept a diary like that," growled the former foreign secretary as he emerged. Callaghan promptly reported the remark to his friend Dalton - who gleefully recorded it in his still-continuing diary.

Since the 50s, attempts have been made to restrain, gag or amputate the right hands of diarists. Occasionally, an ashen prime minister will call in his cabinet colleagues and say with a wan, already-defeated smile: "I hope nobody is keeping a diary." The colleagues titter. All are aware that diaries can be coded or disguised in a dozen ways, and that a serious attempt to stop them would simply up the interest.

Making them mandatory could be more interesting. Instead of CCTV, a version of Big Brother: everybody would be in the same boat, spied upon and spying. Diarists would be less scurrilous, for fear of the scurrilities of others. Universal transparency would give diaries declining media value, newspaper readers could get back to the crossword, and politicians get on with governing...

They may wish. The hard truth is that political diaries are on the increase. Setting aside the public appetite for what the tabloids call "romps", what does it all matter? Do the diaries of the famous tell us useful things, or - a la Currie - merely divert attention?

There is an incontrovertible answer. Diaries are the foodstuff, the basic rations, of history. Books about the recent past are eclectic, drawing on public records, private papers, published documents, newspaper accounts, broadcast recordings, confidential interviews, letters and diaries. Of these, a well-kept diary is almost always the most interesting, if simultaneously the most dangerously seductive.

Victims typically disparage the messenger. It has become a truism that diaries are splenetic, malicious, deliberately dissembling, different from how others remember events etc. All of which is often true. Yet if they are an incomplete and misleading source, they are the least worst. As for the others - autobiographies (unless diary-based) are far more riven with error and post-hoc special pleading; public records are filtered by officials called "weeders", who remove everything incriminating; newspapers are spun, broadcasts planted, witness accounts are notoriously inaccurate on fact. Diaries are wicked Exocets that hit well below the waterline - but they are close in time and space to the events they describe, as well as being uncensored at the moment of composition.

Of course, all diaries are written for an audience. Diary writing, like all authorship, is a form of exhibitionism, though of a particularly self-centred kind. Good diarists are generally addicts to the confessional, unable to break the habit. But even the most genuinely private diaries are composed with a reader in mind, if only the writer himself.

Modern readers like intimacy and texture as much as they like scandal. Diaries provide them. Indeed, so essential an ingredient have diaries become that it is now impossible to publish a big-selling biographical study without a diary base - skewing the biography lists away from the actually important towards the merely scribbulous. Diaries offer freshness and immediacy. They are also revealing in spite of themselves, giving away more about their authors than is often intended. Diaries are terrible deceivers, but principally of themselves. The charm of diaries (including the best) is that however hard the writer tries to conceal it, true character - the vanities and warts - inevitably becomes apparent.

A diary is a record, but also a fantasy - a literary work seeking to make sense of the life of the author. Sometimes the novel or play-like quality is overt - as in the diaries of literary people, such as Virginia Woolf, but also of political ones such as Pepys or Beatrice Webb - structured around an unfolding narrative, with a series of overlapping stories woven into the text. A diary is never a camera: the author has feelings and expresses them.

At the same time, a diary is an opportunity for self-description and reassurance, and the choosing of an identity. Politicians write diaries to tell themselves who they are (like teenagers, and for much the same reason). The diary page becomes a mirror in front of which the diarist performs: I am this kind of person, the writer declares, with these kinds of views. For the public, this adds to the fascination: the reader becomes a voyeur, making his or her own judgment about the ego at the heart of it all.

Here indeed is a little irony: diaries that are presented as shock/horror revelations about rivals often end up exposing their authors more than anybody, giving the victims the last laugh. Thus the diary of the late Lord Reith ("splenetic" is an understatement) was intended to see off his enemies. In practice, its posthumous publication undermined his own reputation. Alan Clark's diary purported to paint others as fools, but ended up revealing the author as a lightweight rogue, while Lord Archer... well, we will see.

Sometimes, politicians of competing persuasions describe the same event and the reader can view it from different angles. This happened in the 60s and 70s when Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn - all inveterate diarists - used to race away from the cabinet table in order to dash off their version of events. Occasionally (for example, over aborted trade union legislation in 1969), the slants of the three are so far apart that one wonders if they could be describing the same event. Thus, there is a striking contrast between the accounts of Harold Wilson's behaviour at a critical cabinet meeting in June 1969, depending on whom you read.

We find Crossman reporting a "terrible exhibition" with a demoralised PM "really shouting, 'I won't, I won't. I can't, you can't do this to me.'" Benn agrees, writing that "he spoke too much, he interrupted, he was angry." Castle, on the other hand, tells quite a different story. So far from being angry, Wilson was "in as buoyant a mood as I have ever seen him." To Crossman, Wilson "rasped", to Benn he showed himself "without leadership qualities". According to Castle, however, "Harold hit back more convincingly than I have ever seen him in cabinet"'

Which all goes to show... or does it? On points of fact - who was there, what was discussed - there is unanimity. It is only the interpretation that shifts - who lost his temper, who kept their cool, who was brave, who was shallow. Reading all three is like looking from different angles at what is unmistakably the same sculpture.

Diaries tell the truth, the partial truth, and a lot more beside the truth. Describing the same events. In them, you seek - and often find - an atmosphere, a sense of the mood of the moment, which can not be acquired in any other way. They should never, ever, be taken as the last word. But as raw material for the reconstruction of the past, they are as invaluable as they are savagely entertaining. We will await the Campbell diary with bated breath.

· Ben Pimlott is Warden of Goldsmiths College and has written biographies of Hugh Dalton, Harold Wilson and the Queen.